Escape

Your guide meets you at Kilimanjaro International Airport and gives you a short briefing on the week. Then it is about an hour’s drive west to Arusha, the town at the foot of Mount Meru where most northern safaris begin.

You spend the night at a large hotel among the coffee fields or a small boutique house with only a few rooms. Either way, the evening is yours to rest.

Today is a full day in Lake Manyara National Park, just half an hour down the escarpment from your lodge. It is a small park, but it packs in a lot: a tall groundwater forest at the gate full of baboons and blue monkeys, open floodplains with buffalo and giraffe, and a wide soda lake at the foot of the Rift Valley wall.

Out on the lake there are hippos, pelicans, storks and, in some months, great numbers of flamingos. Manyara is also known for lions that climb trees, though they are hard to find. You have lunch in the park and are back at the lodge in time to enjoy it.

A full day to explore, with no bags to pack. The central Serengeti around the Seronera Valley has water all year, which means it has lions, leopards and cheetahs all year too. Your guide will check the river trees for leopards and the granite kopjes where the prides like to rest.

If the migration herds are passing through, you may spend part of the day among thousands of wildebeest and zebra. If not, the resident game keeps the day busy. Lunch can be a picnic out on the plains or back at camp.

A slow breakfast, then you leave the highlands behind. The road winds down the escarpment past Lake Manyara and through Mto wa Mbu, a busy market town at the foot of the Rift Valley wall, then crosses the dry Maasai plains to Arusha.

The drive takes about three hours, and the tour ends in Arusha around midday. That leaves the afternoon free for an onward flight, a night near the airport or a hop to Zanzibar.